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J. Edward Oliver, 1942-2007

the Last page of the last Buster Comic ever, published the first week of the present decade:

it was a deadening shock to receive the news yesterday morning that cartoonist Jack Edward Oliver had died from cancer at the age of 65. I had known his style from kidness back when reading his neatly drawn strips like "Vid Kid" and "Cliff Hanger" in Buster and other IPC comics as they hung on through the rise and wane of Madchester, but had only gained a deeper respect for him in the last 18 months when I discovered his 70s pop comic pages he had created for Record Mirror. These were a revelation to me, each page was a hamper full of contemporary pop culture references, tortured puns, puzzles, and GREAT artwork (the above example of his work doesn't begin to do justice to the photo-realisitc rendering he was displaying weekly at his 70s pop peak ): in fact, each of those pages (many of the later ones printed in beautiful red duotone or even a few in colour) should be hanging in galleries instead of rotting away in the attics of those prescient enough to cut out and keep them back in the day.